Participation, transparency and trust in local governance in transitional countries: the case of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

The cynicism about government has induced administration reforms in both developed and transitional countries. However, the reform outcomes are not similar across countries and depend on the administrative context. In this paper, we employ the cultural-based administration approach to investigate the role of trust in citizen participation and the linking between participation and transparency in Vietnam. Using aggregated data at the district level from the Public Administration Performance Index in Vietnam in 2018–19 and considering the two-way association issue, we find that transparency is not always indicative of participation and trust is shown to be an important determinant of public participation. Furthermore, in addition to normative factors such as education levels and the proportion of rural citizens, trust plays a significant role in explaining the inverse relationship between participation and transparency. Our results contribute one more empirical evidence to the scarce literature that embeds the administration culture analysing administrative reform outcomes in transitional countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Local governance
• participation
• transition
• transparency
• trust
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The data are not publicly available due to regulations from the organization which provides the data.

Notes

1. Although investigating whether public participation in administration leads to trust, Wang and Wan Wart (2007, pp. 268–69) provide frameworks for the correlation in which citizens’ belief that their comments are carefully considered is the determinant of participation.

2. Kim (2014) also investigates how generalised trust and institutional trust affect citizens’ participation in Central and Southeast Asia. The findings show that only institutional trust is significantly related to political participation, which is defined as voting.

3. The Politburo is the highest political committee in Vietnam which comprises 11 highest politicians in the communist party. The function of the Politburo is to set the mission and strategic direction of the country.

4. According to Administrative classification, Vietnam has five centrally managed cities (i.e. cities directly belonged to and managed by the central government) including Hanoi, Hai Phong in the north; Da Nang in the centre; and Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho in the south.

5. The p_value of the test is equal to 0.826. Thus, the null hypothesis stating the equality of the two coefficients cannot be rejected.